To finish with _simplisme_ or naturalism, let us say that, carried to
its utmost extreme, it becomes a fixed idea, a monomania; has not
impressionalism attained to this even in the choice of colors? It has
been said of certain painters that they had only to upset their palette
on the canvas to compose their pictures! Yet this varicolored chaos is
not the characteristic of the school On the contrary, certain favorite
colors prevail; do not green and violet rule almost exclusively in some
of the most striking pictures from impressionalist brushes?
There are moments when we ask whether the impressionalists and their
adherents are not obeying an impulse to contradict rather than a serious
conviction. In either case, it is time for many of them to furnish
proofs--that is to say, works,--in lack of the reasons which they have
not even offered.
After this digression, forced upon me by recent scholastic quarrels, let
us return to Delsarte.
I have given the reasons for his doctrine in other chapters; this
doctrine will gain strength when I show what I have gathered from his
science, since science and law mutually testify for each other; since
all art, acquiring fresh vigor from its source, _law_, and enlightened
by the aid of these same formulae, must bear the impress of truth, beauty
and goodness.
Even where color occupies in painting the place attributed to outline in
sculpture, there are in these two manifestations of mental images--and
in spite of the synthetism peculiar to painting,--striking similitudes.
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